280 pages indexed and with 17 black and white plates. The jacket is chipped at the edges with minor loss to the head of the spine and the top outer edges; the preliminaries and end paper are lightly foxed, the body of the book is in excellent condition. Clean,unmarked and solid. "Mary Mackay (1 May 1855 -21 April 1924), known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli, was an English novelist. She enjoyed a period of great literary success from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until World War I. Sales of Corelli's novels exceeded the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, although critics often derided her work as "the favourite of the common multitude.....Corelli is generally accepted to have been the inspiration for at least two of E. F. Benson's characters in his Lucia series of six novels and a short story.[28] The main character, Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas, is a vain and snobbish woman of the upper middle class with an obsessive desire to be the leading light of her community, to associate with the nobility, and to see her name reported in the social columns, coupled with a comical pretension to education and musical talent, neither of which she possesses. She also pretends to be able to speak Italian, something Corelli was known to have done. Miss Susan Leg is a highly successful writer of pulp romances under the pseudonym Rudolph da Vinci. In E.F. Benson's "Secret Lives" a famous novelist Susan Leg, writes a book in which the heroine is another writer - Serena Lomond. This character is meant to be very similar to Susan herself, but in fact Serena Lomond is the spit of Mavis Clare in Marie Corelli's "The Sorrows of Satan". The character makes her appearance in Benson's work a few years after Marie Corelli's death in 1924. A modern critic has written that Corelli was probably also the inspiration for "Rita's" (Eliza Humphreys's) main character in Diana of the Ephesians, which was published a year before E. F. Benson's first Lucia novel, and had been rejected by Hutchinson, which later published the "Lucia" Lucas novels." (Wikipedia)